Marcello Carlin and Lena Friesen review every UK number one album so that you might want to hear it

Tuesday, 8 July 2014

MADONNA: Like A Virgin

(#320: 21 September 1985, 1 week; 12 October 1985,
1 week)

Track listing: Material Girl/Angel/Like A Virgin/Over
And Over/Love Don’t Live Here Anymore/Into The Groove/Dress You Up/Shoo-Bee-Doo/Pretender/Stay

(Author’s Note: Although this was,
strictly speaking, the year’s fourth number one album to have been released in
the previous year, “Into The Groove” was added at the beginning of side two of
the UK edition in the summer of 1985 and was a major factor in the album
reaching number one.)

More so than The Lexicon Of Love or Thriller, the advent of Madonna
represents a very clear split in this story; you can readily break up the
history into what happened before Madonna, and what happened after her. Once
Ari Up complained, “We ain’t no material girls!” and a few years later, there
was Madonna singing, or sneering, about how nice it was to be a material girl.
I grant that the video does allow for the existence of irony, but there is
absolutely none in Madonna’s smugly robotic vocal performance, and one has to
ask whether the visuals – the Madonna brand equity, if you would – have taken
irreversible precedence over the music.

The core of Like A Virgin – the title song, “Material
Girl,” “Dress You Up” – could be interpreted as the elements of Ze Records
taken to their non-ironic but logical conclusion. This, the record implies, is
where New Pop has led us; the celebration of consumption, and more importantly,
of image, and the ruthless jettisoning of any useful or compelling subtext.

This represents a key
difference from what went before; however much Presley, the Beatles or even
Bowie marketed themselves, however many times they changed their image, there
was always the underlining codicil that these people had talent, something to
say, and therefore there was something or somebody to sell. But with Madonna
selling became the primary purpose, superseding content. She became anything
you wanted her to be, without ever making the fatal error of letting you get
too close to her.

All this is known, of
course, and I don’t believe you are in urgent need of further painful semiotic
analyses. What depresses me most, at this stage, is how anaemic and lacklustre
a pop record Like A Virgin is,
particularly as her debut album had actually been quite promising (and with
songs like “Burning Up,” “Everybody,” “Lucky Star,” “Borderline” etc. I would
argue that it is the superior record; up to date without needing to impose a
date stamp on listeners’ foreheads). She wanted Nile Rodgers because of his
work on Let’s Dance, and after Bowie,
Rodgers was pleased to be working with somebody who knew exactly what she
wanted (“I knew him before the butter dropped of (sic) his noodle,” quips Madonna in the album credits); it was she
who had to persuade an extremely sceptical Rodgers that “Like A Virgin,” the
song, was worth recording.

But his work here seems as
mechanical and unrewarding as what he did with Bowie. The hits are more
recognisably “Chic” than “China Girl” or “Modern Love” but if anything the
production holds back. Despite the singer’s protestation on “Over And Over”
that “You’re never gonna see me standing still,” Like A Virgin sounds like a backwards step.

Certainly the overall
impression that the record gives is one of low-calorie bubblegum, utterly
conventional and conservative, with a few outré
elements to trap the unwary (her “legendary” TOTP performance of “Virgin” featured theatrical tropes that I
recognised from the work of Lydia Lunch). Fillers like “Pretender” and “Stay”
sped past my ears and vacated themselves from my mind even while they were
still playing (it is a record of hits and B-sides). She obsesses about “eyes”
like no singer in this tale since Justin Hayward. “Shoo-Bee-Doo” is Diana Ross
at Blackpool Central Pier, complete with obligatory talkover and eighties
saxophone “solo.” She is even for the most part lumbered with unhelpful
Jordanaires-style backing singers (and the Simms boys from Let’s Dance are among them). The disastrous attempt at “Love Don’t
Live Here Anymore” highlights her vocal and emotional limitations quite
severely and pitilessly (even Jimmy Nail managed a better interpretation); she
sounds mildly annoyed rather than heartbroken.

For Madonna really isn’t
much of a singer, or a presence. Her voice is usually blaringly high and loud
(possibly tweaked upwards mechanically), sometimes rising to a pertly rough
shriek, with no real underlying personality. The songs sound like Fame rejects. Were it not for her façade
of “modernity” we could be back in 1978 Tiger
Beat land. As for “Into The Groove,” the bonus number one hit that had
nothing to do with Chic, I am afraid that it has not aged well – try listening
to it now, as opposed to what you remember feeling when you heard it
twenty-nine years ago – and next to the still astounding Cubist electro of
records like Shannon’s “Let The Music Play,” and despite its lyrical
sentiments, it sounds, dare I say, a little square
in 2014 (for a lot of the time on Like A
Virgin, Madonna seems to want to reach back to pre-Beatles girl pop, specifically Brenda Lee, and to a lesser
extent Connie Francis; the lyrical theme of “Material Girl” goes back decades,
as its “Shop Around” paraphrase makes it abundantly clear that she understands
that this is the case).

If you wanted dynamic and
inventive female pop music in 1985, there was, and is, Teena Marie’s Emerald City. But poor Teena was never
as good as selling herself as Madonna was, and so she is now gone and largely
forgotten whereas Madonna is routinely hagiographised. The lesson was this: it’s
always the pushy people who get to the front, the squeakiest wheels that get
the lion’s share of the oil, regardless of what they might have to offer.
Talent or even basic expression was no longer required. Make yourself into the
biggest image you can find, and you will become that image. Is it just me who
finds Madonna’s “Sing it to the WORLD! – Now I know you’re MINE!” two-thirds of
the way through her Live Aid performance of “Into The Groove” one of the most
terrifying spectacles of the eighties, and the clearest sign of the ruination
to come? Was Madonna really everything “we” wanted?

You're right about the vocal tweaking. It's very Minnie Mouse, and the two big hits from this album still make me feel queasy - so easy, so needy. But I do love Angel, which feels closer to the first album and has a strong Shangri La's tang.